Friday, April 17th
11:00am - 7:00pm
Graduate Student Symposium
11:00 am | Session One: Animal Worlds and Material Culture
SARAH EGAN
M.A. Candidate, Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture
Bard Graduate Center
The "Bird-Fancyers Recreation”: Constructing Bird Knowledge and Meaning in an Eighteenth-Century British Handkerchief
KATERINA LANFRANCO
M.A. Candidate, Philosophy
New School For Social Research, The New School
Animal Motifs in Classical Greek Art: Reading Artifacts through Aristophanes and Plato
LIBERTY LEONARD-SHAW
M.A. Candidate, History of Design and Curatorial Studies
Parsons School of Design, The New School
“A green pasture”: Whalebone extraction and abundance in the American Age of Sail
2:00 pm | Session Two: Plants, Oceans, and Ecologies
MITCHELL HERRMANN
Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art and Film & Media Studies
Yale University
A New Natural History: Precious Okoyomon’s Kudzu Art
ANNA FLINCHBAUGH
Ph.D. Candidate, Art History
University of Southern California
Mesopotamian Madder and Massachusetts Material: Vegetable Dyes at the Deerfield Society of Blue and White Needlework
ERIC MAZARIEGOS
Ph.D. Candidate, Art History and Archaeology
Columbia University
Waves and the Roiling Ebb and Flow of Tairona Metalwork: Envisioning the Oceanic Turn in Ancient American Art
HADLEY NEWTON
Ph.D. Candidate, Art History
CUNY Graduate Center
Framing the World Outside: The Ecological Optics of James Turrell’s Mendota Stoppages (1969-1974)
5:00pm | The Catherine Hoover Voorsanger Keynote Address
PETYA ANDREEVA
Assistant Professor of Asian Art
Vassar College
The Nonhuman Turn in Asian Art History and Historiography: New Perspectives from the Silk Roads
*Lunch will be provided and reception to follow*
Presented by the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design, The New School and The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
Sarah Egan is a second year Master’s student at the Bard Graduate Center focusing on 19th- and early 20th-century American decorative arts and material culture and its intersections with the history of education and anthropology. She received a BA in art history and English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has held positions at the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture, the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, the Wisconsin Arts Board, the Miller Art Museum, Preservation Long Island, and Emma Scully Gallery.
Katerina Lanfranco, an NYC-based artist, creates paintings, drawings, cut-outs, installations, and sculptures. Her work is featured in collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Kupferstichkabinett Museum in Berlin, and the Corning Museum of Glass. Represented by Nancy Hoffman Gallery since 2006, Lanfranco’s art has been exhibited across the U.S. and internationally in Toronto, Berlin, Milan, and Kyoto. She holds a BA in Art, Visual Theory, and Museum Studies from UC Santa Cruz and an MFA in Studio Art (Painting) from Hunter College, CUNY. Currently, she’s pursuing a Master’s in Philosophy at the New School, focusing on Eco-Philosophy and Aesthetics. Lanfranco teaches studio art at Hunter College and at Parsons School of Design. She has received numerous awards and residencies, including the Japan-US Creative Exchange Fellowship, Pollock Krasner Fellowship, and residencies at Vermont Studio Center and the Elizabeth Foundation.
Liberty Leonard-Shaw is a student in the History of Design & Curatorial Studies MA program at Parsons School of Design and a curatorial fellow in the Textiles Department at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. They graduated from Newnham College, University of Cambridge with First Class Honors in English Literature in 2023 focusing on nineteenth and twentieth century American geopoetics. Liberty's current research examines the material and visual culture produced during the American Age of Sail.
Mitchell Herrmann is a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Film & Media Studies at Yale University, where he researches modern and contemporary art with particular interests in ecology and the environment, media and technology, and critical theory. Previously, he taught at Sarah Lawrence College, where he was the 2025 Mellon Fellow for Civic Engagement. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in October, TDR: The Drama Review, Art Journal, Texte zur Kunst, and MoMA Magazine.
Anna Flinchbaugh is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and a participant in the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate at the University of Southern California. She works primarily on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century decorative arts and textiles, with an emphasis on the intersections of gender, labor, and materiality. Her dissertation considers how women used art needlework to both make claims about the historical past and participate in the industrial present. Her work has been supported by USC's Visual Studies Research Institute, the William Morris Society in the United States, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Decorative Arts Trust.
Eric Mazariegos is an art historian of the ancient and Indigenous Americas. His dissertation—recently completed as a Junior Fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks—examines Tairona metalwork from ancient Caribbean Colombia (ca. 1000-1500 CE) through the lens of the Blue Humanities. He holds an MA and MPhil from Columbia University, and a BA in Art History and Spanish from UCLA.
Hadley Newton is a doctoral candidate in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center. She researches transnational artistic movements of the postwar era, particularly those integrating interdisciplinary knowledge and methods. Her dissertation examines the impact of theories of Gestalt psychology on artistic practices in the United Kingdom and the United States from 1950-1975.
Petya Andreeva is an assistant professor of Art History at Vassar. She teaches and writes on premodern Central and East Asian Art and Material Culture, with an emphasis on cross-cultural encounters along the premodern Afro-Eurasian trade networks. Andreeva is the author of the monograph Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE, published by Edinburgh University Press. Her articles and chapters covering a wide geographical and temporal scope within Asian art have appeared in the Art Bulletin, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Fashion Theory, Early China, Archaeological Research in Asia, among other journals. She is the recipient of the Getty-ACLS Fellowship in the History of Art and a UNESCO Silk Road Research Award. Andreeva was previously a faculty member at ADHT, where she taught a wide range of classes in design history, visual and material culture, including graduate electives at HDCS.
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